More cirCLe CD news, or lack thereof: spent most of the week getting#

Sun, 02 Nov 2003 15:00:57 +0000

More cirCLe CD news, or lack thereof: spent most of the week getting to grips with the Debian kernel packaging stuff, and building initrds, and El Torito boot images. Then spent most of the weekend so far writing up what I'd done (look out for forthcoming Linux Journal article, with any luck).

The simplest way to do moderately sensible removable media support seems to be a combination of hotplug (to notice when new devices appear/disappear), supermount (to notice when/whether these devices actually contain disks) and xfe: a file manager which doesn't require a whole desktop infrastructure to be present before it will so much as run. I remember using supermount an awful long time ago (I guess it would have been about 1995, when I still used floppies for anything): I'm amazed it still exists and is available for current kernels. Kudos to Stephen Tweedie and all the hackers who've worked on it since then.

I don't often use a file manager: a shell with tab completion does most of what I want to do with files. After playing with xfe for a few minutes to see if it works, though, I notice my home directory is significantly less cluttered with random files I'll never use again. Perhaps I should use a file manager.